In this week's episode of Scratch, Eric Fulwiler is joined by Rand Fishkin, CEO of SparkToro! Many of you will have heard of Rand, he founded SEOMoz back in 2003 as a blog, and he also founded a business around it in 2008.
Rand has also written a book called 'Lost and Founder'. This conversation revolves around marketing, but we also cover all things about being an entrepreneur - working smart and not hard, mental health and building teams.
Tune in, this is a great one!
Transcript
Rand: Oftentimes people are like, yeah, I'm taking a shower, I'm doing my workout. And then that the idea comes to me. This in my belief is that is a way to make yourself a better founder, entrepreneur, marketer, thinker, strategist, all these things because your decision making will improve by taking breaks and having rest and not working as hard. Your brain's still working for you, man. <laugh> take advantage of it.
Eric: I'm Eric Fulwiler, and this is Scratch bringing You Marketing lessons from the leading brands and brains rewriting the rule book from scratch for the world of today.
Hey everyone. My guest today is Rand Fishkin. Many of you will have heard of Rand. He's the founder of SEO Maz from way back in 2003 as a blog, and then he founded Maz the Business around it in 2008. More recently, he co-founded SparkToro! four and a half years ago. He's also written a book called Lost and Founder. Fascinating conversation. I'll be honest with you. Some of it talks about marketing and how he grew Moz and how he's growing SparkToro!. A lot of it talks about being an entrepreneur, being a professional, and everything that goes into that in terms of the right way to work and working hard versus working smart mental health, how to build culture, how to build teams. It's a different conversation to some of the ones that we've had with kind of more pure play CMOs and marketers, but it really resonated with me and I think it will with you as well.
A couple of the things that were really interesting to me, his concept of chill work. So at SparkToro!, it's a team of three and they aim to work 20 to 30 hours a week. And actually he only speaks to his two colleagues. He said synchronously on a Google Hangout once a month. And so that's just completely different model from a lot of startups and certainly kind of the stereotypical startup high growth culture and approach. We also talk about zero click content how to build content marketing into today's environment where a lot of these platforms don't want you to go off the platform and how you kind of have to deal with that. So really fascinating conversation, really valuable conversation. I think anyone will find this valuable, but particularly if you are kind of an entrepreneur working in a startup, thinking about these conversations and how you prioritize between work and life and is there a better way? I think you're really going to like this conversation. So without further ado, please enjoy Rand fishing. All right, well thanks so much for making the time. Was really looking forward to this conversation. I know you have a ton going on in your world, so I really appreciate it. Let's get into it. So first question that we ask everyone, what is a brand that you are very passionate about and why?
Rand: Yeah I thought about this question a little bit. I think I have a bunch, but one that particularly resonates with me recently was introduced to me by my colleague Amanda Natividad, and that's Force of Nature meets. I don't know if, do you know them, Eric? I'm not sure if they're right in the uk. Don't heard of that. So Force of Nature does something called regenerative agriculture and regenerative meats, meaning they use animals in a sort of near wild state and this includes lots of animals that many people aren't usually eating. So bison and bore and venison and those kinds of things. And you can order them on the website. They have a fantastic email newsletter that I actually learned a bunch of cool tips from and better ways to grill things. I picked up this amazing port wine and fig sauce from them that pairs beautifully with venison. Anyway I could go on and on, but they're a brand that I really admire. I think they're building something special. The product is sort of special in itself, and then the way they're doing it, the way they market it and talk about it, it's all very authentic, unique. The value proposition is clear. The pricing's actually pretty good. The service is great, all of the branding around it, the visual branding it all fits and makes sense and this is one of my favorite things about great brands is that they have a story to tell all the way through the funnel from the very first time you experienced them down through the experience of learning more into becoming part of their audience or joining their email newsletter, following them on social, whatever it is, and into their content marketing. And then finally through the purchase and product experience. I think this is rare, unfortunately, but Force of Nature does a great job,
Eric: Pun intended with the rare comment. No, yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I'm a marketer, so this is what I see in everything that I look at. But I just clicked onto their website and we will definitely include the link in the show notes as well. It looks great. And it's interesting what you said about the email newsletter because maybe this is weird to admit, but I'm very passionate about finding good email newsletters because one of my things I guess, is I think that it's such an interesting distribution channel that obviously gets attention, but I don't think gets enough of the right attention from most marketers, particularly B2B marketers, but also b2c. Everybody has email. It's so frictionless to sign up for an email newsletter and yet so many businesses kind of do the bare minimum. They do it because they're like, oh yeah, we need an email newsletter, let's pump something out. Or even worse, let's just tell people about what we want to sell them and what we're doing as opposed to thinking about how can we add differentiated value through this channel and actually think about how can you kind of think a media company, you know, think of the Morning Brews and the Athletic and these major newsletters. Those are media companies built through email as a channel, and I think there's a huge opportunity for brands to do that. So I'm about to actually sign up and I like their little call to action button that says Join our Herd consistency. So I'll have to check that out. It's a really good one.
Rand: Yeah, thanks. No, I agree with you. I think that part of the problem, not to reign on the parade of your ex company, but many folks feel like they have to be everywhere and Gary V obviously one of the proponents of the Bee Everywhere sort of movement. And I think especially in the marketing universe for a lot of folks in that space, they have this idea that, shoot, I got to start my TikTok. I got to be on Facebook, I got to be on Instagram, I got to be on Reddit. Am I doing enough on LinkedIn? Am I on Twitter? Am I figuring out my Pinterest strategy, all these platforms? And I couldn't disagree with the advice of Be Everywhere more. I think that great marketers start small. I think they focus on a few channels, sometimes only one where they're really good at outperforming their competition, where they have a unique value, a differentiated value to use your words from everyone else that that's the game I would play that. That's how I like to do it.
Eric: Yeah, I definitely agree. I think that focusing on that beachhead type of approach, where can you carve out your niche? Where can you really differentiate and deliver value that people can get from somewhere else? And particularly when you talk about, and when we talk to startups, it's all about prioritization. That expression of startups don't starve, they drown. Brands don't starve, they drown in the early stages as well. I think there is an argument and having spent a lot of time with Gary be impossible for it. Not to rub off on me, but I do actually believe that in the debate between quality and quantity, cause that's kind of part of what we're talking about here. Quantity I think doesn't get enough attention. I think it get gets a bad wrap. I think that it should be more important in organizations to focus on putting out quantity of content and there needs to be quality to that too.But the way I think about it and the way I've worked with teams on it before is instead of a quality ceiling where everything you put out is the best that it could possibly be, I think there needs to be a quality floor. And that's going to differ based on who you are, who the organization is, who the brand is for Gary, there is no quality floor a bit in those conversations. It's his team that puts the floor in. It's not him. He would put out and has put out the worst quality concept because he is religious and fanatical about quantity over quality. But I think for most people there's a balance to it. But I do think that both matter
Rand: Interestingly enough, I think that's part of his differentiation.
Eric: Yeah, there you go. For sure.
Rand: Doesn't work for everyone. Works for him.
Eric: All right, we got through one question in seven minutes. This is going to be a really good one. I love it. So Rand, I'm sure a lot of people have heard of you and some of the businesses that you've started, but for those who haven't I'm just thinking it'd be great to get your story, but maybe we can spin it a little bit because you've told it a million times and I'm sure people can find it out there. So maybe tell people a little bit of the story of your background, what you're doing with SparkToro! of course, but maybe within that if you could focus on how you grew these businesses, how you thought about growth and marketing within that
Rand: So let's see, really, I've only had two businesses that I think you could consider moderately serious big picture investments. Technically there's a couple others, but I think we can ignore them for purposes of this conversation. The big one that a lot of folks know is Moz, which started as SEO Moz, which initially was a blog and then became a consulting company and then a software company. And in that company the growth was primarily driven by a content and SEO flywheel. So no surprise, right? SEO Moz, which became Moz was a search engine optimization software business. And so eating our own dog food, doing seo, putting out lots of content of many different kinds very popular blog, a series of quite popular articles. I think <laugh> most many folks who are in SEO and have been in it longer than five or 10 years would say that the beginner's guide to SEO on MAs was the one of their steps along the path to learning the practice and lots of other big content pieces like that. So MA's Growth Flywheel was essentially put out content, amplify that content over whatever platforms were available at the time. This was in the days before a lot of social media and then after as well. So MAs used a variety of methodologies to get its content amplified and then hopefully earn links and clicks and brand awareness and all those kinds of things, positive signals in Google rankings, and then start to rank for lots and lots of keyword phrases around it, bring traffic to the website. Hopefully some of those folks would find the product and sign up for a free trial. The business was venture backed Derek. And for anybody who's read, lost and Founder You that I wouldn't do that again, I don't. I think as a more mature entrepreneur and maybe hopefully a more, I hope I'm more mature as just a thinker and a human being. I don't like the venture model as an entrepreneur, I can see why it's appealing to investors but it is a very low odds, very high pressure and stress and intensity with a tremendous amount of risk. And even the rewards tend to be poor. So if you look at what percent of venture backed companies are going to make back their minimum investment return requirement, it's 3% that that's not good. Terrible. You would be better off starting a restaurant business where 50% of them are still in business after five years. So survival rates very low, unhappiness, very high. The growth at all costs mentality, which lots and lots of venture companies as pursue is not appealing to me. I don't actually think that growth is a great goal in and of itself. I don't fundamentally like it or think it's critical or necessary. I think that a lot of companies focus overly focus on growth at all costs instead of survival, happiness creating good products, fitting their fundamental architecture and strategy together. And so they're constantly chasing growth hacks and quarterly numbers, whatever those numbers might be. And I think it costs a lot of people their happiness and sanity and I think it costs a lot of companies their survival, which of course is a venture model. But I aim into that. So SparkToro! to get to my second company, I started that the day after I left Moz, which was just a little over four years ago. And that this business is very different. So Moz was 50 million a year in revenue when I left. It was 200 plus people offices in a couple countries, had done a bunch of m and a and SparkToro! is three people and we're right around 1.5 million arr but still very tiny. The product's only been live a couple years and we plan to grow more slowly. And we have this approach, Amanda and I talk about it all the time called Chill work, where essentially our target goal is like that we really only need to do 20 or 25 hours in a week and sometimes we put in 30 and sometimes we even put in 40, maybe one week it'll go wild and put in 55, but rare, extremely rare. My co-founder Casey today is out caving with a friend of his, he's not answering his email, he's going to be off the grid. It's great. We just do that kind of stuff all the time and it's a beautiful way to live a life and it, it's growing as fast as Moz was in its early years. Anyway, that's a long rant. There you go. A no, I
Eric: Love it. I love it mean there's so much to pick up on there. I can relate maybe on the wrong or the different end of the spectrum with the stage that I'm at. So obviously Rival is now venture backed and we are transitioning and starting to build more product and want to become more of a technology company. So maybe we'll get there at some point, but I'm wary of it for many of the reasons that you are as well. I think there's kind of this glorification of raising venture capital that just does not need to be there. And it's as much of a brand thing, meaning vc, the industry as a brand, as it is anything else. And these stories of the big tech companies in the early days and the Venn VC firms that were part of it, it just seems I think if you actually cut through, I think there needs to be a much more balanced, rational and logical approach to thinking about it.
That said, where I'm at, and I actually put a post out about it on LinkedIn today kind of saying, Hey, I think the work-life balance conversation is misguided because it mostly focuses on there being a right answer. And I don't think there is a right answer. I think there is a right answer for each person, and I think more of the focus of the conversation needs to be on who you are and what your ambitions are and what your right balance is, and then trying to make sure that you build your work and your life around that. And for some people that could be 20, 30 hours a week. For some people it could be 50, 60 hours a week, maybe that's where they're happier. And so I don't think that there's a wrong answer. That said, there is certainly, although I'd be curious to hear if you think it's getting better, because I do think it's, I think of the early days with Gary and VaynerMedia, there was the whole hustle porn hustle culture thing, and he has certainly dialed that down because I think he's very good at keeping a pulse on where the tidal waves of culture are going. But yeah, I do you think that we obviously still have a long way to go? Cause I think there are so many people out there, not just in the startup world, but just in the professional world in general that have pressure from their companies or from the industry they're in or from culture in general to put glorify the hours as opposed to the output and not focus enough on understanding what they need and what work-life balance means to them.
Rand: Yeah, so I agree. I think that your statement about there being sort of a right path for each person but not a right path for everyone universally is generally correct. I do think that the last 20 years especially have particularly in technology, glorified long hours and hard work over output and quality of work, especially slow quality of decision making quality of product over quantity of hours. I think that that conversation still has yet to happen where the only place where I really see that happening, there's this beautiful movement in Italy that's been going on for the last quarters century called the Slow Food Movement and the Slow City movement. And I think those have a really beautiful philosophical approach to capitalism. This idea that you can build small, beautiful, well-crafted things that create amazing lives and they are not focused, the measure of success is not quantity of economic output. I like this idea. I don't think the US over the last a hundred years has grown GDP extraordinarily well and quality of life not so well. And so when we look at it from a macro level, I don't like what I see and I see that trickling all the way down to the micro level where managers and teams and CEOs at startups at bigger companies, they have this idea that ours worked is somehow both a badge of honor and a thing to strive for. I think that's fundamentally wrong.
Eric: So I admitted before we started recording that I have not read Lost and Founder, but looking at it, preparing for this conversation, it's definitely something I'm interested in. So it's on the list now, but for myself and those who have not read it, what is the main message there? Let's maybe double click on that a little bit.
Rand: Yeah, <laugh> a funny question because I was talking to some folks on Twitter I think yesterday or the day before about Lost and Founder and has how almost every other business book has a fundamental kind of core message that you could distill in a few sentences explained to somebody. And then if you read the Wikipedia summary, as long as it resonated and you remembered it all, you'd really get 90% of the value from the book. The book is presenting an idea that hopefully sticks with you. And then there's a lot of stories about the idea and applications of the idea. And this formula is extremely successful. It's a great way to sell a business book. It's a great way to market it. It's a fantastic way to become a paid speaker on the circuit talking about your thing over and over and get your Ted Talk lost and Founder has none of those. There is no central tenant other than startups are complicated and difficult and here are a bunch of stories and lessons from this one person's company and then many other stories that are similar and related and potentially alternatives, opportunities, tactical things to think about that might guide you toward better decision making in these processes. And I think there's 17 or 18 chapters in there. Each one of them focuses on one core idea with a lot of complexity behind it. So the answer is lost and Founder, lots of nuance and complexity, which I think is the real story and the true story, but not a very marketable story.
Eric: I like that. I like that though because I feel it, and I'm sure a lot of people can relate to what you said. So many business books, you know, could have read it in 20 minutes or 30 minutes or the first three chapters. I get it. And the next nine chapters are just kind of reinforcing what they already said. So I like it. And also I am going to read it, I think that what you were talking about, which is just a more honest depiction or story of what it's like to be an entrepreneur. That's something that I've really felt this being the first time that I've actually started a company. I've been in a lot of startups, but it's very different when it's all on your shoulders. And I think that there's a kind of general, again, glorification of what it means to be an entrepreneur. And a lot of it is hard, a lot of it is stressful, a lot of it is making mistakes. A lot of it is not what you see on LinkedIn and Instagram. And so I think having a more open, honest, balanced conversation around that is a really good thing for a lot of people.
Rand: I certainly would agree with that. I think that anytime you build incentives for a certain type of behavior, you're going to find that behavior dominates and the behavior that is incentivized from LinkedIn and Instagram, but also from the venture capital world and investor world more broadly, even the m and a world is sort of always on high performing, high capacity entrepreneur with no weaknesses, who fits a classically sort of stereotypical very American male culture and masculine culture, and anyone who doesn't fit that is sort of an oddity. And there's like, I think struggles if you want to exist outside of that universe, and I almost want to say negative perception as well and it's not always from community stuff. You'll see plenty of people posting on LinkedIn about, Hey, here's the real story and it's hard and I'm experiencing these challenges, or I had a mental health episode or whatever it is but it's almost always accompanied by here's how I was able to overcome it and do even better than I did before, because that's the only story that's sort of permissible and incentivized in the environment we exist in. That sucks. I hate it. I think that one of the unique things about Lost and Founder is that it tells a story of a messy, stuck in the middle kind of venture backed company that's very common. MAs eventually did sell a couple of years after Lost and Founder came out, but I don't think any investor would look at it and go, oh, that was a phenomenal investment. I'm really glad I made that. It was messy and ugly in those last few years that I was there. And the next few after I left were very limited growth and very painful. I think really hard to work there for a lot of people, that is the truth, that is the overwhelming truth. That truth is 10 times more common, 50 times more common than the, look, I made all this money and we've sold for a hundred million dollars, whatever, blah, blah, blah. But that's, there's no incentive for anyone to tell that story by publishing Lost and Founder, here's what I did, Eric. I made sure that no investor would ever fund me again. <laugh>, right? Yeah, I could virtually guarantee it and I think I hope that I made myself in an honest way look like a poorly performing CEO E o and not a great founder because that is the honest truth. I look back at the person that I was and how I thought about building a business and I think and hope that I've come a long way. But absolutely the mistakes were terrible. The whole philosophy was bad expenses, the way to spend capital, the decision to raise, especially the second round, just poor all throughout. There was a great offer from HubSpot that a lot of folks talked about in the book because it hadn't been previously public publicly talked about. And that was a phenomenal offer and I turned it down because I thought we were, the gross curve was going to keep <laugh> going the way it had all sorts of things. But who, who's going to reward that story? It's fun to listen to on a podcast, it's interesting to consume, but it does nothing for its author. So you're not going to find stories like that. And that's why I like telling them is because they're rare.
Eric: I do think that there is, I don't know what the right word is. I mean, I totally agree with you, and if you're going to try to write a bestselling book or take it to a publisher, that's probably not the pitch. However, I do think, and I've found in some of the content that I do, obviously on a much smaller scale, I think people appreciate and are interested in authenticity. And so I think there's, with so much of people promoting themselves and talking about the wins and the headlines and the money and all that stuff, I think it's refreshing when people hear authentic, true, honest, relatable type stories. So maybe that's a little bit more of a zig to go along with all the zags that people are more likely to consume. But I do think that there's something to that. So let's talk a little bit about SparkToro! . So one, I think I'm going to look at it for Rival because it definitely looks relevant for and would be really helpful for us, but how are you, so one, can you unpack a little bit what it actually is, because there might be some people listening that it could help. And then two, how are you thinking about growth for SparkToro! as a business?
Rand: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're right, I actually failed to answer that in your previous question about how the two companies grew. So SparkToro! is audience research software. It's essentially one of my favorite ways to explain it is the dream come true marketing for a ton of companies is to get a list of your customers and potential customers get their home addresses go to their houses learn lock picking, break in, disable their alarm systems, steal their phone and then go through and look at everything that they read, watch, browse, subscribe to, listen to follow, talk about across all their channels, and then do your marketing in such a way that's going to reach and resonate with that target market. Now of course, this is highly unethical, extremely illegal. There's no way anyone should do it. But the next best thing is, and we saw some folks doing this before we built SparkToro! , is many, many people, certainly not everyone, but a high percentage of modern internet users put this data out there publicly on the internet. If you go visit someone's Twitter profile, you can see everyone that they follow, all the tweets that they send, the hashtags that they use the lists that they're on, the links that they tweet about or reply to, you can then find their LinkedIn profile and see a bunch of data from LinkedIn about education and background and demographics. This for people who have public accounts, you can visit their YouTube page and see all the YouTube channels that they subscribe to, and you can go to their Reddit account and you can see all the subreddits. They're part of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So this graph, which we sort of build at SparkToro! , right? We crawl all of these profiles, we'll be like, oh, okay, here's LinkedIn. And then we found his website from that. And on his website it links to these five social networks. Let's go see which ones, see, okay, whatever. He's got a private Pinterest account, but the rest of these are public. Let's go crawl them and see what we can find. And then we throw out all the personally identifiable information and aggregate and anonymize it. We only do this with public data. We only do it in the same way that Google would crawl the web for example. And so we're like California privacy compliant, GDPR compliant, all that kind of stuff, aggregate and anonymize it, and then you can search. So you could say, I want to know what landscaping professionals in Florida follow on the internet. I want to know what they read and watch and listen to show me the podcasts that are popular with them. Show me what media channels they pay attention to. So show me who they follow on Twitter and Instagram and LinkedIn and Facebook and all that. And that's what SparkToro! can do. And this demographic and behavioral information is super useful to a lot of founders and product folks. And of course, very interesting to most marketers who have to do campaigns and targeting of any kind, whether that's, or your ad targeting or your outreach, your content marketing, your sponsorship pitches, like yada, yada, yada. You want to know where is my audience what do they talk about and what are their behaviors and demographics so that I can craft good messages for them.
Eric: And so you mentioned you're a couple years in now the business is growing, sounds like pretty well at three people. What are the plans and the strategy for growing it?
Rand: Yeah, so we take as I mentioned, this unique kind of chill work approach to it, which doesn't mean that we are not working, I hope intelligently and making good decisions about it, but definitely means that we don't have a growth at all cost mentality. So the basic focus for us is let's be consistently improving the product itself. That's in terms of data and data quality and features. And my co-founder, Casey, is mostly in charge of that. And very, he and I Amanda brainstorm and get together over a meeting on Google Meet, maybe once a month, very, very infrequent. And then we all kind of do heads down focus the rest of the time. Amanda and I are focused on more of the growth side from a marketing and audience building perspective. And I would say that my focus is a little more on the middle and bottom of funnel, whereas Amanda is very much the top of the funnel. So she runs our webinar series called Office Hours. She runs our social media accounts, she runs our email newsletter. All of it's centered around this idea of essentially capturing people where they already are. So going and finding relevant podcasts and YouTube channels and social accounts that they follow, and then building relationships with those people, providing value to them in such a way that they want to feature and talk about SparkToro! . And then we sort of amplify our message through them. And the idea is that we want to turn some of these other people's audiences into our audience. We hope that they come subscribe to the blog, subscribe to the email newsletter, follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever. And then slowly over time when they need audience research when they're like, gosh, it'd be really useful if I could, I don't know, go target this audience figure out which podcast to pitch, or I want to do a YouTube ad campaign, I want to figure out what YouTube channels they pay attention to, or I'm going to do some social stuff, whatever. And that works quite well for us. So we have basically a couple hundred, 300 folks signing up for the free version of the product every day. And that turns into our customer base long term, which is around 1500 paying subscribers right now. And this is philosophically kind of how we intend to keep growing the business. So there's not a lot of, Hey, we're going to radically change up the formula. This is something that we intend to keep doing providing value in our unique differentiated way, and hopefully continuing to earn an audience and turn some of those people into customers over time.
Eric: It's entirely how I think about it. And a lot of the work that we do at Rival is working with brands on shifting the North Star marketing from extracting value to adding value to the audience that they're trying to reach. Because if you do that consistently and in a differentiated way, then it brings the market to you. So I love that. I'd be curious to understand maybe taking it down a level. So more tactically, let's say that this podcast had the audience that you were looking for. How would you go about trying to add value to shift or to connect with the audience that we have and make them more of your audience?
Rand: So the big thing for me when it comes to especially podcasts or any type of, I would say broad media in general is my goal is people have heard of SparkToro! and they have a positive association with it and some memory of what it does or what it's about. So my hope is that whenever I speak on a podcast or go to an event or a conference or whatever, I do a webinar that folks come away thinking, oh, SparkToro! , that's interesting. I had never thought that there was a place where I could go find whatever landscape architects or go find chemical engineers in the UK or go find CMOs in the United States and then see literally, oh, 32% of them follow this person on their social accounts and 15% listen to this podcast and 12% use this hashtag, and 10% have this word in their bio. That's cool. I want to know that. I might want to know that at some future point. And then hopefully they remember and come back. So it's a little bit of classic marketing and branding. It's just creating that association, making it a positive one, and then sticking in the mind of a potential future customer. And I think the helpful part, the thing that SparkToro! does that we didn't do at Moz that I wish we had done is rather than have a free trial where you come put in your credit card, get 30 days or whatever, we have a free version, forever free version. So you can essentially come use the tool K kind of like people would use a Google Trends or a similar web for free or something like that. And then they can essentially, whenever they're ready, subscribe. So if they see that they're getting some value from the free version they might sign up for the paid version. And if they can't afford it, I love being able to provide that value too. I think that's a really good thing for word of mouth and brand building. We have lots and lots of evangelists of Spark Tour who've never paid us a dime, but have turned into a community of audience builders for us, and that's, man, you can't beat that.
Eric: I love it. Super smart. All right, ran, before we start wrapping up, I'd just be curious to get your quick thoughts because I see that you've been posting about it a bit recently on zero click content. So how do you define it? Why does it matter to marketers?
Rand: Yeah, so this is the brand creation of my colleague Amanda. And so Amanda had this idea after seeing a lot of the research, some of the research that we had done around zero click searches from Google where two thirds of Google searches in 2020 at least ended without a click. So that's essentially someone found what they were looking for. They had their problem solved by the Google search results without having to visit anyone's website. And this also extremely true in the world of social media and social networks and content networks like a TikTok or a YouTube where essentially those ecosystems have stopped trying to, Hey, come to us and then find the thing you're interested in and click off to another website. They have all prioritized native content and in in network consumption of content. TikTok more than anyone, but certainly all of them have taken this hard directional shift in the past decade. And so now if you want to earn an audience on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, whatever, you have to create content that is native to those places and help the network keep people there, which marketers especially B2B marketers, have been trained for the last 20 years. I want to see attribution. I want to see how many people clicked from Instagram, from LinkedIn, from Twitter, from Reddit over to our website and then signed up for whatever. Otherwise, you don't get budget, you don't get investment. Pretty dumb <laugh> because obviously this is at odds with the network's goals. And so Amanda created this concept and she just wrote about it last week of zero Click content, which is essentially you are producing content that will be consumed on the network natively. It will not drive any visits. The only thing you have to measure it with is vanity metrics like views and impressions and likes and new followers, and you're going to have to suck it up and just accept that a ton of marketing is now impossible to measure and serendipitous, and it comes over time. And if you are willing to subscribe to that belief set, you can have a tremendous amount of success building audiences on and off these platforms and earning the visit later through people saying, going to Google six months after they heard about it and searching for SparkToro! or clicking through to your bio and following you, and then a year later maybe clicking on something that you shared. So different philosophical mindset. I think zero click content for many folks. It's something they've been practicing for a while but didn't have a name for.
Eric: Yeah, that's kind of how I was thinking about it. That's what we do, or I do with my content is I know, and my primary channel is LinkedIn. I know that if I put anything with a link there, it's going to do so much worse. And so I try not to, and it is about the longer term building of the brand. And it's funny you said that because or part of what you said within there is similar to how we think about talking to businesses and advising businesses on the post iOS 14 digital performance landscape. It's like everybody's trying to figure out how to go back to the way it was. It's not going to happen. This is the new reality. People are going to look back on what you used to be able to do and in digital performance and be like, wow, those were the days, at least from a business performance standpoint, maybe from an ethics and privacy standpoint, not as much, but the world changes, technology changes, things move on, and so it's much more about like you're saying with zero click content, figuring out the way to do better with the landscape the way it is, as opposed to getting hung up on the way that it used to be.
Eric: So I love that. All right, Rand, I am going to let you go. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Just to wrap things up, the last question is what is one thing people should do differently after listening to this conversation?
Rand: I mean, my hope is I'm going to take us back to the beginning of the conversation and this idea around chill work because I think that folks misunderstand what I mean when I say it a lot, and that is Eric, do you ever have this experience where you cannot remember the name of an actor, a movie, a restaurant, and you're like, ah, my God, it's right on the tip of my tongue. I just can't think of it. And then five or six minutes later, you'll be walking somewhere and it'll shoot out and you're like, yes, that's, that's who I meant. It's that, but Charlene's the wrong yes, that that's who was in that great comedy. That is your brain doing work in the background, and your brain sucks at doing this background work, this background process for you, unless you give it room to breathe, and by room to breathe, I mean not focused on other tasks, chilling out, playing a video game, going for a walk. Oftentimes people are like, yeah, I'm taking a shower, I'm doing my workout. And then that the idea comes to me, this in my belief is that is a way to make yourself a better founder, entrepreneur, marketer, thinker, strategist, all these things because your decision making will improve by taking breaks and having rest and not working as hard. Your brain's still working for you, man, <laugh> take advantage of it.
Eric: I love it. That is a great note to end it on. So Ran, thanks so much again, great to see you again after so long and looking forward to becoming a customer of SparkToro! definitely sold me on it. All right, man. Have a great rest of your week. I'll see you soon.
Scratch is a production of Rival. We are a marketing innovation consultancy that helps businesses develop strategies and capabilities to grow faster. If you want to learn more about us, check out wearerival.com. If you want to connect with me, email me eric@wearerival.com or find me on LinkedIn. If you enjoy today's show, please subscribe, share with anyone you think might enjoy it, and please do leave us a review. Thanks for listening and see you next week.
